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  I asked several mining-stock analysts if they had a clear picture of the theft. They told me that the miners do not state such losses openly, but give “post-theft” data to the analysts. Nevertheless, that the theft “is bigger now than ever before in the country’s history is a given,” said Leon Esterhuizen, head of the London-based mines and metals unit at CIBC bank, and a veteran analyst of South African gold mines. Esterhuizen saw an industry robbed at will by “rich criminal masterminds sitting back and offering key people amounts of money several times their salaries to just ‘look the other way.’ ” Like Polela and Gastrow, he believed the thieves had “deep connections within the police force and politics.”

  In South Africa, a kleptocracy was feeding at a golden trough. Gold had helped build the country and now was helping to corrupt it. A metal had seduced a state.

  GOLD BOOSTERS LIKE TO SAY that men have always thought that gold was valuable: that its value derives from universal certitude. But we don’t know what people always thought. The first gold miners were preliterate and left no record of their thoughts. It’s fair to suppose they liked gold, because they kept it.

  I have a little catalogue called Thracian Treasures, from the Varna Museum in Bulgaria. In the ancient world, Thrace was renowned for its gold mines. Some of the objects pictured in the catalogue are 6,000 years old. They form the earliest treasure of gold artifacts in the world, discovered by accident in 1972 when a backhoe operator uncovered a late Neolithic tomb at Varna on the Black Sea, unearthing bracelets and beads; a solid-gold nail with a mangled shaft; a tiny breastplate, four inches square; a delicate, paper-thin spiral tape, like a golden ribbon. The tape weighed a tenth of an ounce. What can it possibly have been good for but delight?

  The Thracian objects had no practical use. They were only pretty. We can imagine what attracted those who made them—the brightness of the metal, the ease of shaping it, its resistance to corrosion. In a mortal world, it was eternally bright and beautiful. Today our asset menu is immeasurably longer than the Thracians’ was, yet gold is still high on it, locked into place by a revolutionary act in Lydia in Asia Minor in 635 BC—the invention of gold money.

  Lydian coinage spread through the whole Mediterranean world. The effect on the place of gold in public life was profound. For states, gold became a necessity. Yet by the fourteenth century, 2,000 years later, the entire world supply would have fit into a six-foot cube. Countries were famished for gold; in Europe, mints were closing. The financial historian Peter Bernstein called this period “the sacred thirst” for gold. It was a thirst that powered the first gold rush—a murderous, cruel, intoxicating, brutal adventure that swallowed an entire civilization and spat it out as coins.

  2

  RIVER OF GOLD

  So began one of the strangest motions of enemy forces in history. On one side a god-king with 80,000 battle-hardened troops; on the other, a handful of aliens, some of them sick, thousands of miles from any support.

  SPANIARDS CAME WELL EQUIPPED FOR the larceny of the sixteenth century. They reduced two empires, almost with a blow. They had the cavalier’s weapon of mass destruction—Toledo steel. The swords were strong and flexible and the blades could take a razor edge. One good stroke took off a head. A horse and rider in full armor weighed three quarters of a ton. This massive equipage thundered along at twenty miles an hour, concentrating the whole weight on a sharpened steel point at the tip of a ten-foot lance. The Spanish could project such power through advanced technologies in sailing and navigation. And they had a pretext for the conquests they would make: winning souls for God. When he set out, Christopher Columbus wrote his royal backers that he would accomplish “the conversion to our holy faith of a great number of peoples.” But he did not forget to mention gold. He mentioned it 114 times, versus twenty-six for God.

  Hernán Cortés arrived on the Yucatan coast early in 1519, and on Holy Thursday landed near the present-day city of Veracruz. The Aztec ruler Montezuma thought the Spanish adventurer was the god Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, and sent messengers to meet him. Cortés fired on them. “A thing like a ball of stone comes out of its entrails,” was how the Aztecs saw the harquebus. “It comes out shooting sparks and raining fire.” By November the Spaniards had arrived at the dazzling island city of Mexico—Tenochtitlán.

  “Gazing on such wonderful sights,” wrote the soldier Bernal Díaz, “we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real, for on one side, on the land, there were great cities, and in the lake ever so many more, and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and in the Causeway were many bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the great City of Mexico, and we—we did not even number four hundred soldiers!”

  By the following June, Montezuma was dead. The Spaniards claimed he died in a hail of stones thrown by his own people, but perhaps they killed him themselves. They were besotted with his treasure. The Florentine Codex, a twelve-volume history from the sixteenth century that contains native Mexican accounts of the conquest, describes Cortés and his Nahua lover, La Malinche, entering the royal treasury.

  [W]hen they entered the house of treasures, it was as if they had arrived in Paradise. They searched everywhere and coveted everything, for, yes, they were dominated by their greed. Then they took out all of the goods which were [Montezuma’s] own exclusive possessions: his personal belongings, all of which were precious: necklaces with thick stones, arm bands of quetzal feathers, bracelets of gold, golden bands with shells for the knees, ankle bracelets with little gold bells, and the royal crowns and all the royal attire, without number, everything that belonged to him and was reserved to him only.

  The news of such riches intoxicated Spanish adventurers, including an illiterate desperado named Francisco Pizarro. He was the bastard son of a Spanish colonel and an impoverished rural woman. His mother, probably a maid, abandoned him on the steps of a church. Raised by relatives, he was a distant cousin of Cortés. In 1513 he accompanied the explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa to the Pacific. Six years later he betrayed his patron, arresting Balboa as he rode to a meeting with his enemy, a rival who accused him of crimes against the king. Balboa was beheaded, protesting his innocence to the end. Pizarro was rewarded with Panama City, which he ran until 1523. The next year he made his first expedition in search of the great civilization rumored to exist to the south. Two years later, he made his second. For demonic speed and horror, few stories can match what happened next, as Pizarro and his tiny band rode into the mountain fastness. It was the lost kingdom of a fairy tale—fantastic, remote, strange, beautiful, and rich. Pizarro was its nemesis, the herald of a greed that his victims could not even comprehend. With Pizarro, a whole continent’s appetite for gold rode into the Andes.

  THE NAME INCA REFERS TO both the people and the leader of the empire of Peru. Inca expansion from the valley of Cuzco began about 1438, when a talented war leader named Pachacuti Yupanqui conquered his neighbors. He was the first Inca to extend his power beyond Cuzco. Pachacuti was the builder of Machu Picchu, the city that hangs on a mountain ridge forty-three miles northwest of Cuzco, and was his private estate. Pachacuti’s son, Tupac Yupanqui, continued the expansion, and by 1471 ruled an empire that extended through the Andes for 3,000 miles.

  The culture and appearance of the Andean people evolved through centuries of life in the mountains. They had large lungs and chests for breathing the thin air of the high altitudes. Their steeply terraced fields blazed with lupines, a food crop. Aqueducts carried water to the cultivated land. The Incas had no money. They worked as part of a system of reciprocal duty marked by celebrations that included getting drunk on chicha beer. Wealth lay in the control of labor, the ownership of land, and the state llama herds. The empire was isolated on one side by the planet’s greatest ocean and on the other by its biggest forest. In the south there was only desert and to the north they had conquered everyone. The Inca’s generals could marshal hundreds of thousands of fighting men. They could move their armies with amaz
ing swiftness along 14,000 miles of roads that astonished the first Europeans to see them. “Such magnificent roads could be seen nowhere in Christendom in country as rough as this,” wrote Hernando Pizarro, the conqueror’s brother. Another Spaniard described a terrifying climb up a “stupendous mountainside. Looking at it from below, it seemed impossible for birds to scale it by flying through the air, let alone men on horseback climbing by land. But the road was made less exhausting by climbing in zigzags.” The main royal road followed the Andes from Colombia to Chile. A coastal highway paralleled the Pacific, and connecting roads joined the two routes.

  Important constructions such as Sacsayhuaman, the immense fortress above Cuzco, used monolithic stones fitted together with impenetrable skill. They had textiles and ceramics and bronze metallurgy, precious feathers, silver, and rare stones. They mined gold and made gold ornaments. Their surgeons could drill holes in the skull to relieve the fluid caused by head wounds. The survival rate was 80 percent.

  They believed they had conquered the whole civilized world. Pizarro went looking for them.

  Early in 1527 a Spanish ship was coursing down the west coast of South America when it spotted a sail. It changed course and overhauled the craft, a balsa raft. The boat had cotton sails and an advanced design. Of the captured vessel’s crew of twenty, eleven threw themselves into the sea and drowned. The rest submitted. “They were carrying many pieces of silver and gold as personal ornaments,” said the Spanish report, “including crowns and diadems, belts and bracelets, armour for the legs and breastplates; tweezers and rattles and strings and clusters of beads and rubies; mirrors decorated with silver . . . emeralds and chalcedonies and other jewels and pieces of crystal.”

  The ship rejoined its consort, a vessel carrying expedition commander Francisco Pizarro. His men were in a pitiful state, three dying every week from hunger or disease. The coast was barren or impassable mangrove. Pizarro gave his men the option to go home, and most of them took it. Thirteen remained.

  The next year Pizarro and this remnant sailed on and reached a coastal town, Tumbrez. From there they made excursions further south until they understood what they had found. They had “glimpsed the edges of a great civilization,” wrote John Hemming in The Conquest of the Incas, “the product of centuries of development in complete isolation from the rest of mankind.”

  Pizarro returned to Spain to raise an expedition. He found the court dazzled by the latest treasure from Mexico. The queen gave him a charter of conquest. He returned to Panama, took ship, and on September 24, 1532, after long voyages and persistent sickness, after desperate marches and misadventure, sixty-two horsemen and 106 foot soldiers turned their backs on the Pacific and struck away into the Inca empire.

  Tawantinsuyu, as the Incas called their country, stretched 3,000 miles from the center of modern-day Chile to Colombia. The Spaniards marching into it could not have conceived its size. The Inca ruled a population of 10 million. Runners brought news from different parts of the empire, racing in relay along the stone-paved roads. Generals rode in golden chairs carried by liveried servants. Stone silos and warehouses held the empire’s food store. The mountainsides shot up like walls.

  Tawantinsuyu meant “four parts together”—a federal state bound into a unified whole. But it was a fractious realm, and the Inca spent heavily on gifts to keep the leaders of conquered people loyal to his rule.

  The Inca’s ancestors also needed gifts. A dead Inca did not lose the prerogatives of state. Each had his own palace in the imperial capital of Cuzco, complete with gold ornaments and decorations, earplugs and feather cloaks and coronets and jade. Treasure chests bulged with their possessions and courtiers waited on them. The ruling Inca paid for it all. He conducted wars of conquest to get the wealth that he had to distribute to maintain his authority.

  The throne did not pass from one Inca to the next according to strict rules of inheritance. Wars of succession among competing members of the royal family could divide the country. Pizarro marched into Peru at such a moment.

  A powerful Inca, Huayna Capac, had died in about 1527, after a thirty-year reign, leaving two heirs. One son, Huáscar, took the throne in Cuzco while his brother Atahualpa, who had been campaigning with his father, remained in command of the main armies in the north. Tensions drove the brothers into civil war. Huáscar attacked northward, but Atahualpa’s general defeated him, capturing Cuzco in 1532, killing Huáscar’s family and taking the Inca prisoner. This was the moment that Pizarro began his march into the empire.

  It is hard not to think that Atahualpa would have annihilated the Spaniards if he hadn’t been preoccupied by war. He knew they were coming. He had sent them gifts. But at the time, he did not even know how the battle for Cuzco had gone. He did not know whether his forces or Huáscar’s had prevailed. This was lucky for Pizarro, because Atahualpa may have had it in his mind to enlist the Spaniards against his brother. That would explain why the Inca had not attacked them on their march, when they were most vulnerable. Another break for Pizarro was that the Inca’s camp, which might have been months away across the mountains, was close at hand, in the direction of his march, making it likely that he would reach Atahualpa before the news from Cuzco did.

  Now the Spanish force entered the shadow of Inca military power. As Hemming imagines it, they climbed an Inca track along a valley that became a canyon. They advanced into the mountains. Everywhere along their route they glimpsed the Inca military outposts high above them, certainly surveying their march.

  “The road was so bad [for horses] that they could very easily have taken us there,” Pizarro recorded, “or at another pass which we found between here and Cajamarca. For we could not use the horses on the roads, not even with skill, and off the roads we could take neither horses nor foot-soldiers.”

  On November 15, seven weeks after they had left the coast, the Spaniards reached a pass above Cajamarca, and the sight they saw as the valley opened before them must have frozen their hearts. On a hill above the town spread the Inca’s camp. The ruler was in the midst of an army of 80,000. The Inca’s tents made a splendid sight, “like a very beautiful city,” one of Pizarro’s men wrote. “Nothing like this had been seen in the Indies up to then. It filled all us Spaniards with fear and confusion. But it was not appropriate to show any fear, far less to turn back. For had they sensed any weakness in us, the very Indians we were bringing with us would have killed us. So, with a show of good spirits, and after having thoroughly observed the town and tents, we descended into the valley and entered the town of Cajamarca.”

  So began one of the strangest motions of enemy forces in history. On one side a god-king with 80,000 battle-hardened troops; on the other, a handful of aliens, some of them sick, thousands of miles from any support. Atahualpa could not have thought of such a paltry force as a threat to his person, let alone his empire.

  Pizarro sent a deputation to the Inca’s camp. They rode through the silent, watching army. Atahualpa was at the hot springs with his women, surrounded by lords and generals. He sat on a low, gold stool. On his forehead was the scarlet tassel that distinguished him from all others. In Spanish accounts Atahualpa displayed unshakable aloofness, neither looking at the Spaniards nor even shifting his position when one rider approached so close that the breath from his horse’s nostrils shivered the scarlet threads on the Inca’s face. Atahualpa did not look up until he learned through an interpreter that it was the white leader’s own brother, Hernando Pizarro, who had come. Making extravagant promises of friendship, the delegation begged the Inca to visit Pizarro in the town. Atahualpa agreed to come the next day. The horsemen returned to Cajamarca to lay their plans.

  Pizarro’s men spent an uneasy night. The campfires of the Inca’s army blazed for miles along the hillside. Fearful of a night attack, Pizarro disposed his men. Infantry and horsemen took up positions in the alleys off the plaza. Pizarro placed four cannon and some musketeers in the little fort along one side of the square.

  In the morni
ng a messenger arrived to say that the Inca would come with his men armed. Pizarro replied that Atahualpa would be welcome, as he was Pizarro’s “friend and brother.” At noon the Inca host moved into the plain, deployed, and waited for the emperor. The Spaniards stayed hidden. The younger of Pizarro’s brothers, Pedro, said that he saw “many Spaniards urinate without noticing it out of pure terror.”

  Atahualpa came in state. His attendants glittered in gold and silver ornaments. A phalanx of court servants in checkered livery went ahead and swept the ground, bending to remove every shred of straw from the Inca’s path. Crowds along the way sang as he approached. Half a mile from town the procession halted. The Inca had decided to break his short journey. It was already late afternoon. Soldiers began to set up camp in a meadow. Pizarro, still fearing that the Peruvians meant to make a night attack, sent a messenger pressing the Inca to come to him that day. Atahualpa agreed, and in the last, slanting light of afternoon, the sovereign’s escort took the road into the jaws of history.

  Most of the army remained behind. About 5,000 lightly armed warriors accompanied Atahualpa’s train. The Inca rode on a silver litter carried by eighty nobles in blue robes. His throne was solid gold. Platoons of men wearing gold and silver ornaments marched after him. Atahualpa wore a crown and an emerald collar, his hair intertwined with gold. His litter was thick with parrot feathers and flashed with gold and silver decoration. Sparkling and splendid, in the midst of a brilliant company, the emperor reached the central plaza. He halted in the middle of the square. His standard was planted on a lance. The square, stiff, yellow flag bore the emperor’s device: a rainbow, and the Inca’s scarlet tassel flanked by upright snakes. Atahualpa looked around for the Spaniards and couldn’t see them. “Where are they?” he called out.